-I ' I ;::- \\- r - " A :( J 7- , " / I -f / f ;/ / / ,/ I ,'-1 I / / L;,7 // "No, we're not eliminating your position, Fischer. We're just eliminating your salary. " . . that unfettered markets and minimal taxes on the rich will solve every domes- tic problem, and that unilateral arro- gance and American arms will solve every foreign one, is dead for a genera- tion or more. And the electoral strategy of "cultural" resentment and fake popu- lism has been dealt a grievous blow. Obama is young, educated, focussed, reassuring, and energetic. He is as ac- complished a writer as he is a speaker. His campaign was a marvel of discipline, organization, and prescience. He has, as a conservative critic acknowledged, "a first-class intellect and a first-class tem- perament." We have had these qualities in our Presidents before, if rarely all in the same person. But Obamàs most vis- ible attribute, the only one mentioned in that Times lead, is unique, even revolu- tionary: the color of his skin. As surely as Appomattox, the post-Civil War consti- tutional amendments, Brown v. Board of Education, and the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of the nineteen-six- ties, Obamàs election is a giant victory in the long struggle against what an ear- lier generation of Republicans called the Slave Power and its long legacy of exclu- sion and hate. During the campaign, Obama's 40 THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 17, 2008 "exoticism"-both real (his childhood in Jakarta) and imagined ("he's a Mus- lim")-served bigots as a cover for rac- ism. But it was a shield as well as a vulnerability. It set him apart from the stereotypes of racial prejudice. It broad- ened rather than narrowed his "other- ness." His absent father was Kenyan; if the son's line of descent includes Amer- ican slaves, they are hidden on his moth- er's side, as they are in the lineage of myriads of this country's white citizens. His upbringing in his mother's far-flung world and the polyglot Hawaii of his white grandparents gave him the per- spective of both an outsider and an in- sider. His search for identity-the sub- ject of his book "Dreams from My Father," now assured of a place in the American literary canon-made him a profound student of the American dilemma. In his Philadelphia speech of March 18, 2008, prompted by the fire storm over his former pastor, he treated the American people as adults capable of complex thinking-as his equals, you might say. But what made that speech special, what enabled it to save his candidacy, was its analytic power. It was not defensive. It did not overcompensate. In its combination of objectivity and empathy, it persuaded Americans of all colors that he under- stood them. In return, they have voted to make him their President. A generation ago, few people any- where imagined that they would witness the dissolution of Soviet totalitarianism, or the inauguration of Nelson Mandela as President of a multiracial South Mri- can democracy, or the transformation of China into a fearsome engine of capital- ist commerce. Nor did Americans of an age to remember Selma and Montgom- ery and Memphis imagine that they would live to see an Mrican-American elected President of the United States. It has happened. No doubt there will be disappointments and difficulties ahead; there always are. But a few months from now a blue-and-white Boeing 747 em- blazoned UNITED STATES OF AMERICA will touch down on a tarmac somewhere in Europe or Asia or Mrica, the door will open, and out will step Barack and Mi- chelle Obama. That is something to look forward to. -Hendrik Hertzberg WIND ON CAPITOL HILL EMANUEL IN FULL . B 8"'" ,alP..: ,-' , J{ Then Barack Obama appointed V V Rahm Emanuel as his chief of staff last week, a bunch of old stories went back into circulation, clues, per- haps, to how he'll run the White House: Emanuel wrapping up a dead fish to send to a pollster who'd made him angry; Emanuel stabbing a table with a knife while shouting the names of peo- ple whò d betrayed Bill Clinton; Eman- uel saying "Don't fuck it up" to Tony Blair. These are memorable moments, but Rabbi Asher Lopatin, Emanuefs rabbi at the Anshe Sholom B' nai Israel congregation, in Chicago, pointed out that they don't capture the whole man. "I don't know him in a political way," Lopatin said, "but I wish all our con- gregants were as loyal to the synagogue and as engaged as he is." Lopatin said he tries not to get involved with poli- tics, since this can lead to trouble (see Wright, Jeremiah; "Sometimes we spir-